In the Event of

I was proud of what I did back then. Feeling I was doing something useful kept me going. While everyone else was watching footie, or getting plastered in the Harbor Arms, me and the crew were up at the OP. That’s ROC-speak, (sorry, Royal Observer Corps), for Observation Post. It took me a while to get used to all these abbreviations.

There were fourteen OPs like ours, right across the North of Scotland. Our job was to send information back to control, “in the event of.” And that event was a nuclear attack. We had stores in the OP to keep us alive for up to three weeks—and that alone was a comfort when you watched the training films and saw what an atomic bomb could do. I mean, Nagasaki and Hiroshima would have been like a six-penny firecracker in comparison.

We had to make sure the stores were all OK, no leaking tins of corned beef, or mice in the cornflakes. Then we’d empty and top up the chemical loo, recharge the batteries (we had a portable generator I brought up the glen in the boot of the Mazda), and test the equipment.

First up, was the Bomb Power Indicator in good nick? The BPI would measure the pressure wave after a blast. And the Ground Zero Indicator—that took a kind of photo of the fireball, though it didn’t look anything like your normal Polaroid camera. We had a clear view down to the Dounreay Atomic plant at Sandside Bay, so we’d get a grand image if that one went off. The reactor was bound to be a target “in the event of.”

Then there were the anemometers that measured wind speed and direction. With our readings, the Met guys could work out where the worst fall-out would be. It was just your bad luck if it was blowing your way. But we had our own personal dosimeters—to check out if you had got a dose, and if you had, there were pills to take.

So, we had quite a lot of gear to look after, and we had to know how to use it. It wasn’t just about protecting the country from the Russkies. I got satisfaction from the job itself: keeping the OP looking spick and span. Even when I was off-duty I’d sometimes drive up and do the odd job.

The bunker was a low mound on the edge of the moor; about the same size as some of the great piles of stones you get round here. They say they’re burial sites going back to the Vikings or the Picts, or some such. The difference is, our bunker was covered in grass. I’d borrow a mower off Alex Campbell, my boss, and give it a run over, always making sure I cleaned the grass cuttings off the vents. And I’d do things that weren’t in the manual, like a fresh coat of paint on the blast door. I even had a wee flower bed, out the way of the wind, with dahlias, marigolds and the like. Daffs in the spring if the rabbits didn’t chew them to bits. We felt it was our place, or at least I did. Some of the others weren’t that bothered.

Even though I generally prefer my own company, I got on with the other volunteers fine. They were a mixed bunch: Lachlan, a crofter from Glen Loth, Willie that worked for Fountain Forestry, Aggie from the shoe shop, and Liz who was married to Willie the undertaker.

As I said, I was working for Campbell the butcher in the High Street back then. The work was alright, but he didn’t pay too well, even though I was fully time-served. It was a small outfit. We killed a couple of steers a week, some lambs in season, and the odd pig. Everything was done in his wee butchery out the back. Though we were small, we knew how to handle meat and we even supplied the Queen Mother when she was staying up at her place at Castle of May. Campbell had a sign, “By Royal Appointment,” mounted over the door.

Back then Helen and me lived in the flat up in the new council scheme off the Thurso Road, and, what with my cash from the ROC and the expenses for travel that helped me run the Mazda, life was good. For once I felt that I meant something. Making a contribution to the country, and better off than we’d ever been. Helen kept herself busy with her wee job in the Post Office and the Am-Dram every Tuesday night. When I was going on duty, I’d put on my uniform, jump in the car, and take the long way round past the War Memorial. The old fellows hanging out at the bridge, them that was in the war, would see me and know I was doing my bit.

Once a year we’d be taken to the RAF station at Leeming in Yorkshire for training. We travelled in an old RAF bus. God, it was uncomfortable. We picked up other crews at Golspie, Dingwall (them that came in from the west coast), and more at Inverness. So, by the time we were bowling down the A9 there were thirty or so of us from the North. It was a long drive, but we had a few beers and a singsong to pass the time.

The training was no picnic. Like being back at school. Hard graft, but I got my head round it OK. Then there were the “strategic purpose” talks: about how the Soviets were a constant threat and that to deter them we had to keep them believing we’d see them coming and hit back before they made any impression. “Mutually Assured Destruction,” or MAD, they called it. The Commodore said that our role was “critical” to keep Boris on his toes. The Old Man was a Battle of Britain hero and with his pipe and his wavy dark, Brylcreemed hair, he put you in mind of John Mills in all those films about the war. You just kind of couldn’t help trusting him.

In the mess in the evening (Christ, the booze was cheap as chips!) we’d sometimes talk about all that stuff among ourselves.

“Them Russkies are never going to try it on,” Willie said. ‘They know they’d get back what they give, and ten times more.”

“Aye, but what if there’s a mistake?” said Lachlan. He’d been in the last war and some of the tales he’d tell made your hair curl. “We know things can go wrong, don’t we?” and he turned to Aggie who brought her half-pint glass of shandy to her lips and peered at the three of us over the rim.

We all knew what Lachlan meant. Two Octobers before, Control at Wick signaled they’d picked up a Russian “Bear” heading SSW, twenty minutes ETA to Grangemouth Refinery; interceptors scrambled from Lossiemouth, the lot! Of course, it was a false alarm—a skein of geese heading south for the winter. Aggie, who’d been a Wren back then, made the call. She was let off with a warning, but left the regular service after that, and that’s how she ended up a volunteer like us. The false alarm gave us all a bit of a fright, but it got your pulse racing.

“Ach, what are you worried about, man,” I said, “we’ll all be safe in our wee bunker. Three weeks’ supplies, and when we come out it will all be over.” I meant it as a sort of a joke, but everyone stopped talking and stared at their drinks.

And sometimes I did think about what it would be like if the balloon went up. My sister, Coleen, a nurse now in Grangemouth with three bairns. What chance would they have, four miles from the refinery? Last time I was visiting there, I said to her man Kenny he should buy in some sheets of plywood, for covering the windows, like, in case things ever got to that stage. He just laughed, and right enough, it did sound kind of stupid in the middle of their lives: the kids going off to dance classes or heading to watch Falkirk play in The Cup. He looked at me like I was some kind of alien.

It was a week later I came home from an overnight at the OP and found Helen sitting in the kitchen. There was a crushed fag-end in the ashtray, and she was lighting another. Her hands were shaking.

“What’s up Ell?” I asked.

She took a slug of coffee and stood up, knocking over the kitchen chair. She had on her good coat.

“Why’re you all dressed up?”

“I’ve had enough, Dougie. I’m leaving.”

“Leaving?” I could feel the blood rush to my head. “Back to your mother?”

Helen ground the ciggy into the ashtray. Her mouth twisted into an ugly red pucker (lipstick at this time in the morning) and she said: “No, I’m moving in with Richard.”

Richard! Richard Baynes, the English teacher at the High School. The bairns called him “Dirty Dick,” and for good reason from what I’d heard.

“You’re going off with that weirdo?”

He was one of those white settlers who sold up in London or somewhere and bought a big house overlooking the beach, the kind of house that none of us locals can afford. It was him started up the amateur theatricals. “The Bohemians” he called them—what a name! He had Helen—play in some rubbish called Waiting for Godot. It was supposed to be four male actors, but they never had enough men, so Helen had to play this bloke, got-up like Stan Laurel with a rope around his, her, neck. I’ve never seen such trash. The one she was in before, Murder at the Vicarage, I liked that one, and she looked smashing in the slinky red dress they gave her to wear.

So, she was off with Dirty Dick. I stood there, still in my uniform, and pulled myself up to my full height. I wasn’t going to let some southern hippie humiliate me. I still had my pride.

“Well, you’d better be going then,” I said and held the door open for her. I looked out the window and saw Baynes sitting in his beat-up Landrover with the engine running.

“Your prince charming awaits,” I said. I wasn’t going to let her see I minded.

“I wanted to tell you myself, Dougie.”

“Well, you have.”

“I’ll come back for the rest of my stuff,” she said as she slunk past me trailing our purple suitcase behind her.

It took a bit of getting used to, Helen being gone, like. I managed to avoid her mostly by switching to shopping in the Co-op; she went to Morrisons usually. She never came into Campbell’s shop. Baynes was a veggie and I reckoned she went that way too. Bloody cranks!

I got into a routine that suited me. Work and the ROC kept me busy enough. I’d spend more time up at the OP, working on the wee plot, trying out new plants—flowers that could stand even in our cold climate.

Everything was fine for a year or two. Then stuff started appearing in the newspapers about how the Russians were not the threat they were, how the country could save millions by running down our defenses. It’s terrorists we should be worrying about now they said; crazy guys with a rucksack on the London Underground, not long-range strategic bombers. At first, I ignored all that chat. We knew that Boris was still probing across the North Sea. This talk about peace would blow over, and me and the others would still be needed up at the OP.

It was September 1991 we got a letter from the Wing Commander telling us that the Group was being disbanded. We were all invited to a ceremony at Leeming. So, we climbed aboard that box of a grey bus and headed south for the last time.

We were paraded in a hanger, in the shadow of some mothballed Vulcan bombers. The hanger was so vast you felt like a midget. Fifteen hundred of us lined up in front of the Air Commodore. It wasn’t the old Commodore, but a chap with sideburns and a kind of whiney Brummy accent, who didn’t look old enough to ride a bike, never mind fly a plane. He thanked us for our service, said how important we’d been in keeping the peace throughout the Cold War. Well, that war was now in the deep freeze, but other types of conflict were hotting up at home and abroad, conflicts that needed different tactics and different skills.

We were all given a medal in a smart presentation box and then dismissed back onto the bus home.

I still go up to the OP, especially on a nice day in May when there’s a blue sky and fluffy clouds blowing out of the Northeast, scudding down from Norway in great white formations.

The OP is all padlocked up now. I lie on the grassy bank with a flask of coffee beside me and look out over the great empty moor that stretches west as far as the eye can see. “The Flow Country” the incomers call it. I listen to the curlews whistling their sad cries, out where the bog cotton nods in the breeze. When the wind’s in the right direction you can smell the sharp tang of the bog myrtle, the smell that brings back memories of my time with the gang, doing our bit. Days that are gone now, with only the overgrown heap of the bunker and the vents flaked with rust and lichen, as a moldering reminder of those happy days.

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